Apocalypse Now?

Independent News Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this...

06 February 2005
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Rainfall in the South could drop by half

Apocalypse now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the Earth
Leading article: The world cannot wait

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable
world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005.
As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into
disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to
flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks
as the time when the last alarms sounded.
Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony
Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the
most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place,
and that time is running out.
Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control
global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear
that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.
The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest
Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the official
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - told a UN conference in
Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached
"dangerous" levels.

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